Ravi Shankar
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Pandit Ravi Shankar (born April 7, 1920, in Benares, United Provinces, British India) is an Indian sitar player and composer.
Musical career
Ravi Shankar has been on stage from the age of 10 and has travelled widely a dancer and a musician. He performed publicly in India in 1939. He finished his formal training in 1944 and worked out of Mumbai (Bombay). He began writing scores for film and ballet and started a recording career with HMV's Indian affiliate. He became music director of All India Radio in the 1950s. From 1946 onwards he composed music for films. Some of his scores include the ones for Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy and Richard Attenborough's Gandhi. He also composed the tune for Saare Jahan Se Achcha.
Ravi Shankar then became well known to the music world outside India, first performing in the former Soviet Union in 1954 and then the West in 1956. He performed in major events such as the Monterey Pop Festival and at major venues such as the Royal Festival Hall.
Already performing in major concert halls all around the world, Shankar, having attained pop cultural fame, was invited to play venues that were unusual for a classical musician, such as the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival in Monterey, California, with Ustad Allah Rakha on tabla. He also performed at the Woodstock Festival in 1969, and with George Harrison was one of the organizers of The Concert for Bangladesh in 1971, in an attempt to raise awareness of the growing crisis (see 1970 Bhola cyclone, and Bangladesh Liberation War. Ravi Shankar asked George Harrison for his help to raise funds for Bangladesh. Ravi Shankar & Friends co-headlined Harrison's 1974 tour of North America with mixed reviews. His final working album with Harrison was on a 1997 album, Chants of India, where Harrison developed an interest in chant music. After Harrison's death on 29 November in 2001, Shankar, his daughter, Anoushka, along with Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Jeff Lynne, Eric Clapton, Tom Petty, Billy Preston, among many others attended the Concert for George in London, where Shankar dedicated the memorial to Harrison.
Shankar has criticized facets of the Western reception of Indian music. On a trip to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district after performing in Monterey, Shankar wrote, Template:Cquote
In 1969 he published an English language autobiography, "My Music, My Life".
Shankar has written two concertos for sitar and orchestra. His 3rd concerto was given its first performance on January 31, 2009 by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and his daughter Anoushka Shankar.The piece is scored for solo sitar and orchestra consisting of piccolo, oboe, English horn, clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet, timpani, 2 percussionists, harp and strings. In the first two concertos, Shankar doubled as composer and soloist. To meet the challenge of notating Indian musical concepts in Western notation, Shankar enlisted Welsh conductor David Murphy to help transcribe the work into an orchestral score.
He has written violin-sitar compositions for Yehudi Menuhin and himself, music for flute virtuoso Jean-Pierre Rampal, music for Hōzan Yamamoto, master of the shakuhachi (Japanese flute), and koto virtuoso Musumi Miyashita. He has composed extensively for films and ballets in India, Canada, Europe, and the United States, including Chappaqua, Charly, Gandhi (for which he was nominated for an Academy Award), and the Apu Trilogy. His recording Tana Mana, released on the Private Music label in 1987, penetrated the New Age genre with its unique combination of traditional instruments with electronics. In 2002, Ravi composed a piece for "The Concert for George." He did not play at the concert, but his daughter Anoushka led an ensemble of Indian musicians in the piece. The classical composer Philip Glass acknowledges Shankar as a major influence, and the two collaborated to produce Passages, a recording of compositions in which each reworks themes composed by the other. Shankar also composed the sitar part in Glass's 2004 composition Orion.
Ravi Shankar has homes in Encinitas, California and New Delhi, Delhi, India.
